In February 2011, the website Business Insider quoted PetFlow.com co-founder Alex Zhardanovsky criticizing the pioneer of the online pet-supply business—Pets.com, which famously blasted onto the Web in the early 2000s and then shut its doors when it couldn’t find a path to profitability. In the article, Zhardanovsky contended that Pets.com got in trouble by selling pet food below cost.

That didn’t go over too well with Julie Wainwright, the former CEO of Pets.com, who wrote a sternly worded response to the article pointing out all the resources that e-commerce entrepreneurs have today that she didn’t, namely low-cost “plug and play solutions” for running warehouses and customer service sites. “Cloud computing did not exist, which means that we had to have a server farm and several IT people to ensure [sic] that the site did not go down,” she wrote.